Earlier quoted context omitted.
It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…
> Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Venezuela isn't a third world country. Yes, they have electricity (and it is very cheap, hence a lot of BTC mining there).
Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
131–140 of 381 posts
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, it sounds like you're saying big drug dealers are just selling drugs to get money to, I don't know, go on murder sprees? I'm not saying violence is not a part of these kinds of crimes, but I don't think the purpose of their participation is just to enable other, more serious crimes. That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough pe…
> That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," This depends very much on who you're talking about. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...
Like I said, I'm not saying it doesn't happen.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is, I don't think it's very common for someone to say "I want to sell a lot of drugs because I can't afford to kill enough people otherwise," This depends very much on who you're talking about. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ana-davila/drug-cartels-where-...
Like I said, I'm not saying it doesn't happen.
I think you underestimate the frequency pretty dramatically.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#134>This was made possible by the arrest of the two administrators of Hansa Market in Germany, aged 30 and 31. Since their arrest, the two men, from Siegen, NorthRhine-Westphalia, have been kept in pre-trial detention, and are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers. So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.
I'm curious how you would construct a switch that couldnt be bypassed by the police once they have full access to the servers.
full disk encryption with a process on the box that will wipe the keys if it's not given the secret handshake on a daily basis?
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#135Dream Market is still up since Nov 2013. (1 year older than even AlphaBay) Perhaps they're the ones that are actually based in Russia ;P You seriously have to be a moron to host your DNM in Canada or NL though, NL LE especially has many years of experience and millions worth of equipment for these investigations. Pick a place where they're less likely to have advanced DMA equipment handy! Even better though, is to ch…
It leads one to wonder... what is the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers. Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers? Maybe some smaller African nations? Botsw…
I wonder whether it is theoretically possible to use small-sized botnet (500 nodes?) for p2p hosting. Something IPFS/Maidsafe/Storj-like, for example, tweaked for even more redundancy and small resource consumption.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way. Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes. More generally, there are a…
> Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it. People don't think in…
> to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan
What the law says is "conspire to violate".
If person X and person Y together work out a way for person Y to commit murder and then person Y commits murder, is person X considered as conspiring?
> People don't think in groups
Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence". If we had telepathy, we could skip the transcoding to sound or text, but we don't yet, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not how entrapment works. Entrapment requires the cops to push someone into doing something they wouldn't otherwise have done. Cops buying drugs from a dealer isn't entrapment, but repeatedly begging someone to sell you some drugs after they initially say no would be.
If the police operates the server, I'm pretty sure they would be reluctant to accept new users as it might be illegal. The law in Europe is not as in US and although I'm not certain here, it's generally much more strict in regards to entrapment in most countries.
I'd imagine sting operations are permitted in Europe, and that's all this would've been.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#138It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source on Github and hosted decentralized on a network like MaidSafe. People love to get high and are willing to pay. Innovation will follow to meet demand.
> It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source on Github
Given that Richard Bates faced prosecution for working on the code of the original Silk Road, this could result in very, very bad repercussions.
GitHub would very likely be raided, and anyone who committed to or forked the repo could be prosecuted. I don't think anyone wants that to happen. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub will update their TOS to ban this kind of software before anyone gets prosecuted in order to prevent themselves from being raided.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
As with all security it's a matter of layers, with each layer making it more difficult, but perhaps not impossible to bypass. A simple deadman's switch might be to host some key piece of the software on a remote server that is harder to access geopolitically and have it stop responding without a periodic login. Recurse a few layers in different geopolitical zones, and it could be a relatively effective deadman's swit…
Why would any admin do this? It would absolutely ruin their chances of getting a more lenient sentence by cooperating with the authorities. The police have these people in physical custody. Why would they take a fall for their (also criminal) customers? There is nothing to gain but much to loose. PS: If there is not enough evidence for prosecution, having a dead man's switch would be incredibly stupid. It announces t…
> Why would any admin do this? It would absolutely ruin their chances of getting a more lenient sentence by cooperating with the authorities.
The police have these people in physical custody. Why would they take a fall for their (also criminal) customers? There is nothing to gain but much to loose.
Actually, having the DB and all important files encrypted would be a better negotiating position for the admin. If the police catch the Admin and also get the DB and important files unencrypted, what is the admins negotiating position? They have the Admin and the important files.
In a perfect world, for the police, they want both, but a second best choice would be having the DB and important files with some jail time for the Admin. If I was the Admin I would give the police a choice, you can get me or can get me with reduced jail time and the DB and important file. You can get the conviction for the Admin and the buyers of the drugs too or Life for the Admin and let thousands of buyers and seller go free. Encrypted files would put the Admin in a great position.
Re: Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down
#140The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing. Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies. That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.
> Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies.
Not exactly, these sites allow you to encrypt your address with the seller's public key. Of course it's possible that the site performs a man in the middle attack, but you could test for this. The big problem is that many users do not take advantage of the encryption features and send their address in clear text.
Regardless, there is inherent risk. Even with perfect encryption, as a buyer, you still have to trust a drug dealer with your mailing address. And there's no way to tell for sure that the seller isn't LE.